 Rip and peace, net neutrality. Well, looks like it's our darkest hour. All that upvoting was for nothing, and title two is now over, and God knows they're going to come for the rest of the net neutrality now that they have the power to do so. So there's nothing really you can do, maybe not until the next election. I mean, given the totally unchecked power we give our unelected bureaucracy, there's a good chance of overturning this in the future. But for the next couple of years, we might as well pack in our bags, go home, and just sort of regroup, reorder, and think about what we're doing. But now that the excitement's over, now that everyone's not going to be paying attention to this as much, maybe you'd like to consider something a little different. Just the hypothetical. What if net neutrality is actually a really bad idea? I'm not saying that it might destroy the world, but what if it's something that's totally incompatible with how the internet is built, and it's totally destroyed the way that the internet is organized? Just a hypothetical. In fact, what if the only reason that people are so pro-net neutrality and gotten so upset in the past couple months is just because they've been sensibly sort of deceived by different corporations whose interests are to do so? I'm not calling you a dummy or anything like that, but just think about it. Do you actually know why people oppose net neutrality? And I mean real reasons, not like, oh, they're just Comcast shills or something like that, because you could just as easily revert that, because wouldn't that make you a shill of Google and Netflix and Facebook and eBay, Amazon, Reddit, Apple, all the other corporations which conveniently control all of the information flow on the internet? Wouldn't it be more plausible to say that you might have been deceived by them? Now net neutrality is an extremely popular idea, pretty much among all Americans. But then again, Americans, there are a lot of dumb things that Americans happen to believe. That's not to endorse anything. So I'm just inviting you to consider it. So let's talk about net neutrality. What kind of things do people say about it that are totally off base? Oh well, net neutrality, it lets us be equal. All sites are equal because of net neutrality. And the way you're supposed to understand that is to mean that, oh, YouTube, this big monolithic corporate site, that's equal to my LARPI and ARCO Communist WordPress blog, or it's equal to my HTML, Ancient Aliens, Bible Conspiracy site or whatever. But that's not how it is at all. It's not that all sites are equal, it's that all bandwidth is equal. So to put it in perspective, let's say someone on your network wants to watch a whole season of Bob's Burgers HD all day, they're just going to binge watch it. That's going to be around, let's say, 30 gigabytes in bandwidth over all that time over the period of the day. Now if you do the math, let's say your Communist blog is 500 KB. That would be about 60,000 hits to your Communist blog would be equal to the full season of Bob's Burgers. So it's not so much that sites are equal, it's that sites that have huge amounts of bandwidth still get put on the same setting as if they were just a gazillion different sites in themselves. So your Communist blog is equal to about a second of Bob's Burgers. That's the proper context to put it in. And ISPs can't make any kind of differentiation. They can't say, okay, Bob's Burgers, you're requesting way too much. We're not going to do that. And the way you have to look at it this way, like so much of our network traffic is just stuff like this. Like in your network right now, there are a gazillion people streaming videos, watching porn, scrolling in Facebook and Twitter and auto loading all these videos and stuff like that. While you might be just looking at a website or something like that, and all of these services, Facebook and Twitter and Netflix, they're not built to economize on bandwidth. ISPs have to figure it out. But Netflix doesn't really have to worry about, okay, well, are we putting too much videos out there? Are we putting them out in the right codex? They might care if it's actually buffering on the other side. But net neutrality protects them from having to actually economize on traffic because ISPs still have to treat them all equal. So even things like, for example, Netflix doesn't really use a cache. So let's say you put a Christmas story on loop in one of your Christmas parties that's playing all day. Well, every time it plays, you're actually re-downloading it over and over again. It's totally unsustainable. And if you look at the actual statistics, streaming nowadays, this wasn't how it always was, but this is something very recent. Streaming is now something around 70% of all internet bandwidth at peak hours. So there's this huge amount that is just streaming. And the thing is no ISP or anyone else can say to Netflix, okay, please encode your videos differently. Use a different protocol. Use something like BitTorrent, which is a little more diffuse, it's easier on a network. Or at least pay money for all the 70% of the bandwidth that you're taking up from networks. But the thing is because of net neutrality, they've never been able to do that. They can't do that. Networks have to slow down because of all of this traffic, which means your internet's slow until your ISP starts actually investing in a bunch of capital investment to build more networking supplies. So that of course costs money. And where does that money come from? It doesn't come from Netflix. In fact, it doesn't even come from Netflix users. It comes from every internet user. Every internet user equally because ISPs are not allowed to discriminate and say, oh, well, this service is taking up more. They have to pay or anything like that. So the thing you have to remember is right now you are paying for premium Netflix. A lot of your internet bill right now is to pay for Netflix. It's to pay for Spotify, for Facebook, all these things that you may or may not use. Maybe you do use Netflix and you're not really pissed about that. But right now your internet bill has that built into it because it can't be targeted to the people who actually use Netflix specifically or Netflix itself. So the thing is why it's so backwards is that Facebook and Netflix and YouTube, Google, Spotify, all these people have convinced average people somehow that, oh, no, it's the little guy. You're going to get throttled. You're going to get really screwed over by ISPs when in reality every case of net neutrality that has been brought up in the past and every example of actual throttling is throttling of some highly bandwidth intensive site like Netflix or something like this. I mean, for example, when Tom Wheeler in the Obama administration, when he suggested fast lanes, keep in mind, that's all words, fast lanes. What he really meant is just separate lanes for high intensive services like Netflix and all this kind of stuff. When he suggested that it wasn't the little people who rose up, it was actual services like Netflix and YouTube and eBay and all these huge sites that don't economize on bandwidth, of course, said, no, we do not want these fast lanes because what fast lanes would mean is they have to pay for their intensive services. And of course, we would benefit hugely if this were the case because they wouldn't be on the same networks as we would be. That would be much better for us, but of course, they've argued against it. But this is the thing that's so maddening because this is one of these situations where our interests in the internet are diametrically opposed to all of these enormous corporations on the internet. But somehow they've convinced us that it's a good thing that basically our internet has to pay for all the bandwidth that they're using even if we are not using them. And the thing is I'm not so much mad at Netflix or any of these sites. I mean, whatever, it's all fine. But the point is net neutrality put in place a series of incentives that made it so people didn't have to worry about what they were actually putting onto a network. And so it basically makes it gives Netflix free reign. I'm not just Netflix, but all of these companies free reign to pretty much organize, build their sites up, build the way that they get information to get data from one place to another. In a pretty clumsy and frankly, antisocial way because they are making things slower and more expensive for everyone else. Now, I'm not saying that this kind of media sharing shouldn't exist or wouldn't exist without net neutrality. What I'm saying is if we actually have the threat of IP saying, OK, well, if you use too much bandwidth, we're going to restrict this. What, of course, happens is that either they start paying their fair share or we start using better solutions to getting data around. For example, 10 years ago, you know, well, people still do this now. But 10 years ago, most of the traffic on the Internet was stuff like BitTorrent. So if you are using a BitTorrent, you know, some kind of BitTorrent protocol, when you download stuff, not only is the actual downloading more diffuse on the Internet because it's downloading little pieces from different people. So it clogs up the network less. Also, when you download something, you have a physical copy of it on your computer. You can copy it every time you rewatch it. You don't have to re-download it. It'd be much better if we had something like that. But net neutrality puts in place these incentives to make us move toward a less efficient equilibrium where everyone is just re-downloading everything. It's, you know, basically a temporary solution to content on the Internet. And this is, you know, what we've gotten from it is this, like, Internet that is incredibly expensive because we have to pay for it, you know, all this bandwidth and all this infrastructure to really just do what we were doing 10 years ago with other kind of protocol. Now, I'm not saying that the demise of net neutrality is going to be something unambiguously fantastic and it's just going to change our life, but it does put the incentives in the right place. So that these kind of companies at least have to think about what they're doing before they organize their websites and organize the way they get media to different places in a particular way. But I would actually like all these terrible stereotypes about what's going to happen when net neutrality is repealed. I would like for them to happen. I would like for there to be tiered Internet. In fact, you would like there to be tiered Internet if you really look at it because the way, I think I said before, right now you are already paying for Netflix. You are already paying for Netflix. You're already paying for Spotify and Facebook. Doesn't matter if you're using them, you have to pay for their traffic because you're paying for the infrastructure to maintain it. So wouldn't it be nice if I, for example, who don't use really the only social media site I really use as YouTube, if I could have some kind of network access that gave me general Internet access but blocked certain sites like Netflix and these big things that I don't necessarily need. If that were the case or if that were the case for you, you wouldn't have to pay for that on your network. You would have a network that has less traffic. It would be a faster speed and it would be at a lower cost. I would like for that to happen. That's something I'm willing to pay for or well, actually I'd probably even pay the same amount I'm paying for Internet now just because it'd be faster. I wouldn't have to worry about everyone getting home and watching porn at the same time, which annoys the crap out of me. But even more so for people who live sort of on the margins. So people who live in rural places or people who live in developing countries or something, obviously this isn't less the case in the United States. What Internet providers ISPs have to do there is because there is not enough infrastructure to actually get Netflix streaming to every African hut is they offer limited Internet packages. So you can access normal sites on the web, but you can't get the Netflix or you can get the Facebook, but it's maybe a text only Facebook or something like this. Now you might say, oh God, oh God, because the net neutrality being gone, they're just going to, we're going to have text only Facebook. No, no, no, what I'm saying is it can be an option because in a lot of places where there is no Internet and developing, you know, laying a bunch of wires to actually, you know, put fiber optics down there isn't actually very economical. It sure would be really nice if someone could say, okay, we're going to limit the traffic you can do. But because we're going to be dealing with less traffic on this, this, you know, network, we can offer you these limited portions of the Internet. That's something that they can do. It's something that they can't do now. It's not an option. Like if you go and run wires out in rural Florida or something like that, you have to pay for everyone who logs on to Netflix in your infrastructure or they have to with increased fees. So I think for fun, it's good to at least look at these insane things that people complain about all these disaster scenarios that are just pathetic. I mean, the thing about net neutrality is in terms of it is a regulation, it's not really that common across the world. And if it is, it's only been passed in the net the last couple years, literally due to lobbying from these corporations like Google and stuff like that. Okay. In countries without net neutrality, the Internet more or less works exactly how it is here except they have more abilities for the kind of packages that consumers can get. Okay. So take this picture. It's been shared a lot. I see people sharing this, you know, saying, oh, God, the world's going to end. Look at these. You have different packages for different stuff. This is from Vodafone in New Zealand. Now the thing you need to realize is as the name suggests Vodafone, it is actually a phone service. But if you actually look at the prices and think about it for a couple seconds, this is actually an incredibly good deal. Now I looked up Vodafone's plans just for fun and it ends up that, you know, for around a month of service, you can get a yearly contract. But for around a month in that, that's about 833 in New Zealand dollars. Now that's about 580 a month, you know, for basic cell phone data plan. And that's 22 gigabytes per month for less than $6 in US dollars. Now you can also, in addition to that, get one of these packages that allows infinite streaming of music or Netflix or something like that. So let's say you want the video package. Let's say you want to get, you know, all this streaming to your phone. Well, that's 20 New Zealand dollars. That's about 14 US bucks. So the end result is for your phone for 20 bucks a month, you could have Internet, 22 gigs, and in addition to that free streaming of Netflix and all of these other video sites. And I wish I could pay that much for Internet. I wish my home Internet was like that. And this is the kind of stuff that can happen when you can actually discriminate for prices. The people who use Netflix, they pay for those. The people who use Spotify, they pay for those. It's not that there are extra additions on to your already existing bill. You have a low starting bill and then you pay extra stuff for the things that you actually want in addition to that. I honestly cannot fault this. The same thing is true of these other pictures you might have seen of a cell phone company in Portugal. Well, it's not just cell phone. They have general Internet services. But, you know, people show this one cell phone plan that's devoted, it looks like mostly to tourists and stuff. But they show it as if this is how it always is and, oh, look at these terrible prices, but they're not really that terrible. And they actually just have normal Internet services that are actually pretty cheap if you look at the actual website. So this is the kind of, I hate to use the word fake news because it's not even fake. It's just like totally disproportionate hysterical reactions to things. It's almost like people want to go crazy looking at this stuff. But it's just not, like, just don't say anything. I mean, my tactic when it comes to anything political is just keep your mouth shut for a couple months. Because if you get invested, if you get emotionally invested in it too soon, you're going to look like a fool when you realize that you've been on the wrong side. That's just my, that's my sentiment. That's why I try and keep it quiet until, I mean, I didn't even put out this video until after net neutrality was over. Or at least title two or whatever. Now anyway, there could be some people who say, oh, but there are these other reasons to oppose net neutrality. I mean, a lot of people just have some ambiguous hatred of all government regulation or some people think it's part of a big ploy for the FCC to ultimately regulate speech and stuff like this. And, you know, those are all theories. There are other reasons not to support net neutrality. But for me, this is the one issue. And that is it puts us in a position where huge companies can have huge data transfers and take the costs and put them on everyone else. And it's brought us to a position where our internet is highly centralized because of this. Because there's no diseconomies to scale. You can have these enormous tech companies that really control all your information. They regulate speech all very delicately. And this is fundamentally what net neutrality has supported over the past couple years. This is what it's enabled. Now, I'm not saying that getting rid of net neutrality is going to totally get rid of this. But it, again, as I said, it puts the incentives in the right place. We might move to a more decentralized internet, which is ultimately my goal. And hopefully it's your goal if you really think about it. Maybe we will lose huge services like Netflix. But the point is, all of the technology is still there. We can still connect to each other. And it's more sustainable to have either a decentralized or a totally peer-to-peer internet. And that's what the internet was founded to be. And hopefully that's the direction we move in. Anyway, so that's about it, this all for this video. If anyone hasn't already unsubscribed and downvoted by now. So thanks for watching, and I'll talk to you guys later.